This hurricane season in the North Atlantic, as El Niño digs in and prepares to cool burlier tropical depressions onto their heels, a strange but historically cyclical cooling event in the waters south of Greenland suggests a weakening Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) might leave temperatures to the south might, as suggested during the last great cold blob of 2016, further diminish hurricane development.

A lighter-duty hurricane season, of course, means a collective sigh of relief among coastal and coastal-adjacent communities at large, and a whiffling sniffle from the few who look forward to the chance to ride on the back of something taller than the toddler-sized trade-wind swells that stave off abject starvation for East Coast surfers during most of the warmer months.

The ocean currents giveth, and the ocean currents taketh away.

Then again, more recent research conducted in 2021 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests a shift of rainfall patterns across the…